Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Jacob Hornberger: The bizarre Trump-Kim summit

Overlooked in all of the hullabaloo over the summit in North Korea between President Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un are two bizarre things: One, the U.S. government is the root cause of the crisis that Trump is trying to resolve and, two, the fact that South Korean president Moon Jae-in is not an equal player in the summit.

It’s important to remind ourselves of fundamentals. The Korean War was always been between North Korea and South Korea. It was never a war between North Korea and the United States. That is, North Korea never attacked the United States and it never invaded the United States. In 1950, North Korea attacked and invaded South Korea in an attempt to unify the country under communist rule. Thus, the war has always been a civil war between two halves of what used to be one country (just like the Vietnam War).
So, how did the U.S. government become a combatant in Korea’s civil war? By butting into the conflict and sending U.S. soldiers, many through conscription, and U.S. bomber aircraft to fight on the side of South Korea.

What business did the U.S. government have in butting into another nation’s civil war? No business at all. But this was 1950 when the U.S. government’s foreign policy of interventionism was in full swing, especially now that the newly established U.S. national-security state was scaring the American people into believing that, without foreign intervention, the communists would come and get them. It is worth mentioning that the U.S. intervention was done without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war, making the intervention illegal under our form of government.

U.S. bombers wreaked massive death and destruction in both South and North Korea, far more death and destruction than would have been the case had the U.S. government stayed out of the conflict. The North Korean people have never forgotten the death and destruction wreaked upon them by a foreign buttinski regime.

Once the fighting was suspended three years later, the U.S. government decided to keep its troops in South Korea, thereby assuring a continuous flashpoint with which to scare the American people with the prospect that the Reds were coming to get them. Despite the passage of almost 70 years and the end of the Cold War more than 25 years ago, U.S. troops are still in Korea.

For those seven decades, U.S. officials have always made it clear that their hope and aim is regime change in North Korea, one through which North Korea’s communist regime is ousted from power and replaced by a pro-U.S. regime. (They have the same goal with communist Cuba. Apparently, not so much anymore with communist Vietnam.) That’s what the ever-increasing economic sanctions against North Korea are all about — to inflict massive economic suffering, including death by starvation and illness, on the North Korean populace in the hope that they will violently revolt against their regime and replace it with a pro-U.S. regime. To regularly remind North Korean officials of the constant danger they face of regime change, U.S. officials have regularly maintained military “drills” in South Korea, which include the not-so-gentle reminder of B-52 bombers ready to wreak death and destruction, once again, with carpet-bombing campaigns on villages and towns across North Korea.

That’s why North Korea acquired nuclear weapons in the first place — to deter a U.S. regime-change operation. And that’s the thing to keep in mind: If the U.S. government had never intervened in North Korea in the first place or if it had come home once hostilities were suspended, North Korea would never have had any reason to acquire nuclear weapons. It is U.S. interventionism that has caused North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons as a way to deter a U.S. regime-change operation.

Therefore, it is quite bizarre that the entire conflict has been turned into a U.S. demand for “denuclearization” rather than an effort by North Korea and South Korea to resolve their differences by arriving at their own peace treaty.

Let’s assume that Trump succeeds in getting North Korea to “denuclearize.” The mainstream press and the Trump acolytes will go ballistic in celebration over this grand “achievement.” But what really is the achievement they will be celebrating? It is the U.S. resolution of a problem that it itself has caused!

By the way, it was the same with ISIS. Trump acolytes and the U.S. national-security establishment are exulting over their defeat of ISIS, which, they said, posed a grave threat to U.S. “national security.” The underlying message was: “Do you see how important our national-security state is now? We needed it to defeat ISIS. The Pentagon, CIA, and NSA clearly deserve more money.”

But lost in all the celebration over the U.S. government’s victory over ISIS is a discomforting reality: The U.S. government, especially the U.S. national-security branch of the government, was responsible for the rise of ISIS in the first place. That’s because its illegal, brutal, deadly, and destructive invasion and occupation of Iraq gave rise to ISIS. If the U.S. regime-change invasion and war of aggression against Iraq had never occurred, there would have been no ISIS to defeat and, thus, no opportunity to celebrate the defeat of ISIS.

It’s the same thing in Korea. If there had never been a U.S. intervention into Korea’s civil war, or if U.S. forces had been brought home almost 70 years ago, there never would have been a nuclear crisis for President Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment to resolve.

That brings us to a second bizarre aspect of the Trump-Kim summit: the fact that South Korea isn’t part of the summit. Why not? It’s their war! Why is the U.S. government taking command over peace negotiations with North Korea when the real war is between North Korea and South Korea? Why aren’t North Korea and South Korea doing the negotiating?

In fact, I grimaced when I read that South Korea president Moon Jae-in was hoping to be invited to the summit. That’s amazing. Moon has effectively converted South Korea into a U.S. colony and is behaving as though Trump is his master. Oh, if only Mr. Trump will invite me to attend and watch the summit or maybe just let me be a “mediator.”

Mediator? Cheesh! That’s embarrassing. Moon is so accustomed to playing the role of a deferential servant that it obviously has not dawned on him that South Korea is one of the two principal combatants in the Korean War. Again, the war has always been between North Korea and South Korea. The U.S. government simply butted into a conflict that was none of its business.

It is North and South Korea who should be having a summit. It’s their war and it’s their peace. They should be sitting down and arriving at a peace treaty without Trump. So what if they reach a deal that Trump doesn’t like? Moon can send Trump and his military forces packing, which is what South Korea should have done a long time ago.

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